Clone HD to SDD Problem

[purecomedy2]

Trying to make an old Asus TP300L laptop work faster with a Crucial BX500 SSD. I tried the Crucial.com/clone process (which is Acronis) which involves leaving old drive in laptop and connecting new SSD via a USB adapter...

When I installed the SSD into the laptop Windows 10 would not boot. Repair type options on the menus not fixing boot stuff.

My existing hard drive appeared to have a physical structure like this:

100 MB Healthy (EFI System Partition)
900 MB Healthy (Recovery Partition)
445 GB Healthy (Basic Data Partition) where this was Drive C and all other partitions didn't have a drive letter in Windows.
20 GB Healthy (Recovery Partition)

On the new SSD (using DiskPart):
900 MB Recovery Partition is Drive C
445 GB partition with Windows is Drive D
The new drive is larger so there's a Drive E with the extra space (irrelevant)
The 100 MB EFI partition is hidden without a letter.
When I'm logged in via a command line window I can see a drive with some windows system files in it called drive X. I assume that's the 20 Gb partition.

My 1st question of many...is it a standard thing on a Windows 10 install to have all these little partitions on a drive. It seems to me to just confuse the clone software. UEFI just assigns whatever drive letter it feels like it seems and takes the control out of my hands here. I used diskpart to make my D drive now the C drive. I attempted to use some things like BCDBOOT to try and fix windows to make it bootable. I'm always 1 step behind in trying to get this fixed.

I'll take any advice I can get. Being a laptop its a bit more physically time consuming shuffling the drives back and forth. I'll try anything. I'll start over with new clone software. I've got a USB device with 2 slots in it where I can put both the old drive and new drive on another computer to do the clone. Main thing I don't want is to pay $100 for some clone tool license and have it fail.

Thanks,

P.S. I'm having trouble finding a good free way to post a picture of what the drive looks like here, will work on it if my text isn't good enough.

PPS. I've posted here hundreds of times before. My old account wouldn't let me log in, believe the email address was some hotmail account I used 20 years ago. Literally nothing I'm doing on computers is working past few days!

[Philip]

Changed your "purecomedy" account email to your gmail account. Let me know if you have trouble recovering password, I can change it for you. Your regular account should let you post attachments/images too, some people use imgur.com too.

Yes, it is normal for Windows to have 3-4 partitions: EFI, Primary, Windows, and Recovery mostly on laptops from the vendor.

That said, You could always to a clean install of Windows 10 also, or "Recovery" if the laptop doesn't like the EFI partition on the new one. I would make a bootable Windows 10 USB, and install on a clean drive once in the laptop.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... c3b507420d

Drivers could be an issue after install, but you should be able to get them from Asus.

[purecomedy]

I have done backups of the drive in a few ways. Was hoping to avoid a fresh install. There would be things I didn't "backup" in a sense that it works seamlessly from a fresh install like my license number on MS Office and such.

AOMEI tools and Macrium Reflect Have not magically fixed the problem. I had high hopes for Macrium Reflect but it just didn't work out.

I think my new plan is to try a fresh Windows 10 install on a drive starting with no partitions and then I'll try to restore just the AOMEI windows backup I have on top of that. Hoping that clears out the weird extra partitions that make things confusing.

[Philip]

If you're using a Microsoft account, make sure that Windows is activated with digital license to that account. Then, when login to the new Windows install, both Windows and office should reactivate automatically, as the key is linked to your MS account.